The Mag: Jiloty — Lacrosse's Golden Opportunity

I’ve made this point before, and I wasn’t the first one to make it. But it’s important to bring it up again, given the disappointing crowds we saw in Foxboro during Championship Weekend and the constant drumbeat of complaints about lacrosse’s pace of play.

Lacrosse has never had such a golden opportunity to take the next step and get closer to North America’s major sports.

There are more people playing the sport than ever before: (684,730 in 2011 according to U.S. Lacrosse, a 170% increase since 2001). There are more people watching it than ever before: between the proliferation of games on TV, the boost in attendance at regular-season and NCAA Quarterfinal games and major events in NFL venues like Inside Lacrosse’s Konica Minolta Face-Off and Big City Classics and Whitman’s Sampler Mile High Classic.

There are more companies investing in it than ever before: Bauer, Easton, New Balance, Nike, Reebok and Under Armour have all bought in. There is more mainstream media coverage of it than ever before: between newspapers, magazines, TV shows, movies and celebrity connections, lacrosse has never had more visibility off the field.

But TV ratings haven’t taken off and Final Four attendance has declined every year since 2007.

People in the sport have been bemoaning the product on the field pretty viciously over the past three seasons, claiming that the once-trumpeted “fastest game on two feet” has ground to a halt.

More people are seeing the sport than ever before, but is what they’re seeing a watered-down version of the fast-paced, up-and-down, basketball-meets-hockey-meets-soccer-meets-football combination that so many of you have fallen in love with?

The question I’ve heard over and over is: if you’re a casual sports fan flipping through the channels and you stop on a lacrosse game, only to see guys standing around passing the ball in a circle for minutes on end, is there anything worth sticking around for?

We know how many more talented athletes are playing lacrosse these days. And we know this game’s potential. That should combine to produce the most beautiful version of the game we’ve ever seen. So why should we let a subpar version of the sport be played in front of its biggest audience ever?

Now, it should be noted here that few people that I spoke with at the Final Four tied this year’s low attendance to pace of play. Myriad other factors combined to cripple crowds at Gillette Stadium.

The last few years, discussing the idea of speeding up the game has been a pointless exercise, because the NCAA can only change rules once every two seasons. The 2012 season was off-limits for change, so last summer all the Rules Committee could do was discuss some experimental changes for the fall of 2011.

But this month, the process will officially begin to discuss and, hopefully, propose change for the 2013 season. That’s why we had to tackle this topic in the August issue.

It is rare that I have a conversation with anyone in the lacrosse world that doesn’t swerve into pace of play. Doesn’t matter what time of year, but if it’s essentially anyone who isn’t a DI college coach, the topic is bound to come up. And so with another season down and a championship game in which just 12 combined goals were scored, it’s clear coaches are going to continue to do whatever they can to win — which is their job — moreso than try to present the most marketable version of the sport.

Coaches being under more pressure to win than ever before is a common place to assign blame in this discussion, and one that’s addressed in Zach Babo’s excellent story.

The other popular answer is the sticks. Defensemen can’t check the ball out of anyone’s stick, so they pack it in and slide incessantly. Yet because offensive players know second and third defenders are coming, and because their coaches are leery of taking risks, they wait and wait for the perfect opportunity.

Stick dimensions are not discussed in Zach’s cover story in the August issue, for the primary reason that it is highly unlikely anything there will change this time around. We elected to keep this entire discussion to how the game is played and away from stick technology.

We had Zach analyze all the factors that have contributed to this current state of the game, and then we focused on the four main solutions: a straight-up shot clock, a modified shot clock instituted after a stall warning, changing the size of the offensive box and limiting substitutions.

I understand the financial issues and concerns over possessions lost to having to roll the ball in the corner when time expires, but to me the answer is a regular shot clock. It runs smoothly in Major League Lacrosse, so we know it works. And it’s the cleanest thing for new fans to understand, something that really should factor into the decision-making process because it’s crucially important if we want this sport to continue to grow.

Speaking of MLL, expansion caused the traditional favorites to do a bit of reworking, but Chesapeake, Long Island and Denver successfully made major changes for 2012 that are working out wonderfully as of the All-Star break.

We’re rolling out some subtle upgrades to InsideLacrosse.com in late July and will also be boosting LacrosseForums.com this summer. So stay tuned as we continue to evolve our online properties.